Greetings everyone, check out my first "game". You can download it at www.tolleyworld.com.

The name of the game is Survival. In Survival, you are in control of a bug. You must find food, water, get rest, and if you encounter a member of the other species, you can fight with them, run, or just try to get along. The object of the game is to be the surviving species. You can reproduce, and you should do so as often as possible.

Each bug in survival only has a lifetime of 3 minutes, making rather challenging to survive. This is why, when you reproduce, your offspring inherits your behaviour. If you go after food and water when ever it is available, your kids will too. If you reproduce a lot, your kids will too. If you attack the other species when ever they get in sight, your kids will too.

Survival is written in C++, using OpenGL for graphics, and DirectX for input. It should run on any windows machine with about 800mhz, and 128 megs of RAM. If anyone has anyproblems, let me know.

Also, feel free to email me with any comments you have at neotolley@hotmail.com

Thanks for posting the screen shot Woodsman. I need to post more screen shots on my website some time.

Brien Shrimp, yea, it is more fun to watch than play. I think that I learned a lot in terms of what kinds of concepts will translate into good games. If you want to get lots of turtles, then do nothing but reproduce. As soon as the game begins, just hit the R button.

Your game does have a compelling concept, I think the execution is a little rough.

* Display all the options on the menu page. Enable mouse selection if possible, it's just not user friendly to use N and M to scroll through a few options. I like the explosion effect though, it's interesting.

* The turtles move way too slow. The turning speed is painful as well. Make these guys move 3 times faster.

* Feedback - I wasn't getting enough feedback from the game in a number of places. This makes me, the user, feel like it's broken. Here are some examples:

Fighting - If you don't want to make new art at least flash the enemy model while he is being attacked. Even better, drop a depleting health bar on his head. Don't give him a ton of health either, the fighting system isn't exactly robust so you want to end it as quickly as possible.

When a creature dies - spurt out some red particles.

Resting - Again, throw some "Z z z's" on top of the turtle when I'm in this mode.

* Modes - Allow the user to lock the turtle into a mode instead of holding down a key. A simple toggle - so I hit E and now my turtle is in eat mode whenever he comes across a mushroom he eats.

* Couldn't tell if this was random or not but put the enemy species on the other end of the map. This is kind of the RTS setup where 2 armies are on seperate ends of the battle field amassing resources, etc.

* Depth - If you want to add another layer of depth to the game, you might allow people to choose which direction the next reproduction will go in. This could almost be considered a type of tech tree. For example :

My turtle reproduces, I get a popup with a choice of traits and their current levels.

A)Fighting: 2
B)Speed: 1
C)Health: 1
D)Reproductive rate : 1

So I choose A and now all the turtles after this one have the new traits and carry them over. Maybe you only get these choices by winning battles with the other species. So you put a point into reproductive rate and every turtle after this tries to reproduce faster.

I know you wrote genetic code to support this - but sometimes removing certain mechanics from the player's control also removes the fun. Even with a point system where the user gets to contribute to the species, you could still have mutations occur.

Extra - I don't know how proficient you are with game code but another cool thing you could add would be a third entity. These would be similiar to the larger insects in Pikmin or monsters in Warcraft 3. Just a large creature that roams the map and wrecks havoc on bother species. If you manage to gang up this guy though, he gives your species a special bonus, like extra speed or better fighting.

Crap - that above post was from me, I don't know how it got anon sorry.